5 Reasons SEO Should Be Part of Your Recruiting Arsenal

By presenting your brand, culture, and values with the right structured content, you’re giving job seekers all the information they need to understand why they should want to work for you. Having an intuitive job search that allows job seekers to quickly and easily find the jobs they are looking for provides incentives for funneling them into the job application process. And having a candidate experience that is mobile-friendly and easy to move through enables higher conversion rates and increased candidate pipelines for job requisitions.

However, all of that relates to after the candidate gets to your career site. What about how they find and enter your career site in the first place? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a little understood marketing method in the recruiting world. But it’s a process and methodology that affects the visibility of your career site in search engines and can make a world of difference in your overall recruiting efforts. In this post, we’ll inspect why you should care about SEO.

1. SEO delivers free, targeted career site traffic

The thing about SEO is it helps bring people who searched for specific terms to your site–they’re essentially qualifying themselves. Recruiting organizations spend an enormous amount of effort and spend getting their jobs up on job boards, but that approach is becoming increasingly backwards as it requires users to navigate to multiple websites just to apply–not to mention the branding changes during the process.

That effort and budget is better served on SEO that generates qualified organic traffic. The impact of SEO compounds over time, as you generate more traffic and your career site pages gain more authority.

2. The results are long-term, not one-time

Building on the previous point, SEO is something that pays dividends over time. It’s like an economy of scale, where the more visitors that come to the site, the more conversions, and the better the return at a lower cost-per-applicant and hire.

3. It builds credibility and trust in your employer brand

There is a certain amount of value in simply appearing in search results for terms directly related to your business. Searchers make mental perceptions of the rankings for the terms they enter into Google and other search engines. They may not realize it, but they do. And in the minds of job seekers, your ranking is a vote of confidence.

4. Job seekers expect to be able to find you in search

Job seekers expect a consumer-level experience today when interacting with any type of digital content. This doesn’t just mean a nice design, it means having the ability to go to Google, type a few keywords like “Java Engineer NYC,” and navigate to a career site landing page to learn more about your company or apply to a job in a matter of seconds. It’s simple and intuitive and it accomplishes the job seeker’s goal.

5. It’s another way to increase your talent pipeline

Of course, traffic alone is not going to increase your candidate pipelines. But would you rather set up your career fair booth way in the back of the venue in an empty corridor or right near the entrance where everyone can see you? All those job seekers walking past you all day by themselves aren’t going to be job candidates, but chances are that quite a few of them will be after you’ve made a connection and talked to them.

Just like a career fair, you still have to make your best effort to sell to your job seekers once they are on your website. However, it’s still better to do business on a crowded aisle than it is to set up shop on a deserted island.

What’s standing between you and more career site traffic?

Many firms have corporate sites that are optimized for organic search. The technology used to prop up these sites allow marketing teams to do the leg work of ensuring that the website includes:

Organized site structure and landing pages with unique content that sells the brand

However, this is not always the case with the career site that may have been built on legacy ATS technology, which is traditionally a backend system. These systems are not up to par with modern web standards and a lot these best practices are not put into place. The end result is that it hinders your search engine visibility and traffic–and consequently your recruiting efforts.

If you’re concerned with your own search engine performance, these are the questions you should be asking your ATS vendor:

Will my job search and job description pages be crawlable by search engines?

Will I be able to expose landing pages with unique content and a filtered set of jobs that target a specific audience?

Can my landing pages have friendly readable URLs that can be linked to for improved page authority in search engines?

Is your job search and job application process mobile responsive?

The challenge is that lots of legacy ATS vendors–many of the ones with deployments at Fortune 500 companies–won’t be able to answer these questions in ways that will satisfy you. The idea with an awesome career site that’s optimized for search and has job alerts and other next-gen functionalities is that it takes pressure off the recruiter by growing your candidate pipeline organically. And if you’re not getting that diversity of benefits, then it’s time to start considering your options.